Hal Douglas is a voice actor who has lent his deep voice to many
movie trailers and television commercials. He has been described by a
Miramax publicist as "perhaps the most recognizable trailer voice in
the business."
Demo
reel

His voice is similar to Don LaFontaine's.

Douglas is known in the film industry as the "In a world..."
guy because many of his trailers start with these words. (That may be
debatable. In an interview with Don LaFontaine, Mr. LaFontaine states that
he wrote and was the first to use that phrase.) In addition, he is the
standard voice-over man for the WB Network.

Hal Douglas can be seen parodying himself in the trailer for Jerry
Seinfeld's film Comedian.

Obituary - Daily Telegraph - 11 March 2014

Hal Douglas, who has died aged 90, was the “titan of
trailers” - a voice actor whose gravel-toned decrees whetted
audiences’ appetites for more than 1,000 forthcoming feature
films, teasing out the explosive action, maudlin melodrama and
intergalactic showdowns coming to a screen near them soon.

His credits include the ominous introductions to Forrest
Gump, Philadelphia and Men in Black. “This summer, check your
weapons, take your seat and say your prayers,” he growled for
Con Air in 1997. His voice-overs were delivered in an almost
omnipotent timbre. “If his voice sounds anything like God’s,
it’s God on Day 7: world-weary and slightly amused,” said one
journalist. Yet he recorded his renditions in a studio on his
farm in the hills of northern Virginia — sometimes still dressed
in his pyjamas.

Hal Douglas was born on January 12 1924
in Stamford, Connecticut, the son of Latvian and Russian
émigrés. During the Second World War he served in the US Navy
after which he studied Drama at the University of Miami in
Florida. “I chased pretty girls into the drama department,” he
later recalled.His career began as an announcer on radio
programmes in the 1950s. A decade later he was producing
advertisements for several prominent agencies in New York, but
by the early 1970s he had begun to work regularly on film
trailers for cinema distribution: “I was really well-equipped
because I had been an ad agency guy. I knew how to read copy and
sell pieces.”

Douglas believed spontaneity (he did not
use a stopwatch) and an understanding of genre lay at the heart
of his art. “You get the description of the movie, the contexts
of the lines that you are doing, and the rest of it is intuitive
, ” he stated in his eighties. “Movies, particularly, fall into
departments. You have an action film, you have a romantic film,
you have the dark films. They all suggest an attitude and a
voice quality.”His main competition for the major
blockbusters came from Don LaFontaine. Nicknamed “Thunder
Throat”, LaFontaine claimed to have created the catchphrase “In
a world... ” — the fallback beginning of many outlandish
trailers — and by the time of his death in 2008 had reportedly
worked on more than 5,000 of them. Inevitably, the two men were
compared. “Hal was the only guy that in some way, shape or form
could be mentioned in the same breath as Don,’’ said Jeff Keels,
producer of the documentary The Voice Gods of Hollywood. “But
there’s a difference between Don and Hal. When Don said 'In a
world’ it sounded like a spot. It grabbed you. But when Hal says
it, it transports you.”

Douglas never had a catchy
moniker, just an instantly recognisable voice. “It hangs out
there,” he said. “You sit down in the theatre and sometimes in
three out of four trailers I’d be on them.” Although Douglas was
reluctant to discuss his rewards from Paramount, Warner
Brothers, MGM and the other studios, voice-over work can be an
extremely profitable career path — actors can earn in the region
of $2,000 per trailer (for recordings lasting as little as 15
minutes).His bass modulations made him perfectly pitched for
other commissions. He worked on television advertisements and
promotions for Disney and the History Channel. He also provided
the narration for sports documentaries on basketball champions
the Chicago Bulls (1996) and the ice-hockey team Detroit Red
Wings (1997).

Film trailers, however, remained his staple
- so much so that, in 2009, he was well-placed to mock his own
trade in the trailer for Jerry Seinfeld’s film Comedian, in
which Douglas delivers a quick-fire clutch of clichés to the
fury of his producer. His long career was characterised by a
sense of humour and modesty. “It’s a craft that you learn, like
making a good pair of shoes,’’ he said. “And I just consider
myself a good shoemaker.”Hal Douglas is survived by his wife
and daughter.